“Hyperion” has next to be considered. This was the only poem by Keats which Shelley admired in an extreme degree. He wrote at different dates: “The fragment called ‘Hyperion’ promises for him that he is destined to become one of the first writers of the age.... It is certainly an astonishing piece of writing, and gives me a conception of Keats which I confess I had not before.... If the ‘Hyperion’ be not grand poetry, none has been produced by our contemporaries.... The great proportion of this piece is surely in the very highest style of poetry.” Byron, who had been particularly virulent against Keats during his lifetime, wrote after his death a much more memorable phrase: “His fragment of ‘Hyperion’ seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as Æschylus.” Mr. Swinburne has written of the poem more at length, and with carefully weighed words:
“The triumph of ‘Hyperion’ is as nearly complete as the failure of ‘Endymion.’ Yet Keats never gave such proof of a manly devotion and rational sense of duty to his art as in his resolution to leave this great poem unfinished; not (as we may gather from his correspondence on the subject) for the pitiful reason assigned by his publishers, that of discouragement at the reception given to his former work, but on the solid and reasonable ground that a Miltonic study had something in its very scheme and nature too artificial, too studious of a foreign influence, to be carried on and carried out at such length as was implied by his original design. Fortified and purified as it had been on a first revision, when much introductory allegory and much tentative effusion of sonorous and superfluous verse had been rigorously clipped down or pruned away, it could not long have retained spirit enough to support or inform the shadowy body of a subject so little charged with tangible significance.”
Mr. Swinburne is a critic with whom one may well be content to go astray, if astray it is. I will therefore say that I entirely agree with him in this estimate of “Hyperion,” and of the sound discretion which Keats exercised in giving it up. To deal with the gods of Olympus is no easy task—it had decidedly overtaxed Keats in “Endymion,” though he limited himself to the two goddesses Diana and Venus, and casually the gods Neptune and Mercury; but to deal with the elder gods—Saturn, Ops, Hyperion—and with the Titans, on the scale of a long epic narration, is a task which may well be pronounced unachievable. The Olympian gods would also have had to be introduced: Apollo already appears in the poem, not too promisingly. The elder gods are necessarily mere figure-heads of bulk, might, majesty, and antiquity; to get any character out of them after these “property” attributes have been exhausted to the mind’s eye, to “set them going” in act, and doing something apportionable into cantos, and readable by human energies, was not a problem which could be solved by a poet of the nineteenth century. Past question, Keats started grandly, and has left us a monument of Cyclopean architecture in verse almost impeccable—a Stonehenge of reverberance; he has made us feel that his elder gods were profoundly primæval, powers so august and abstract-natured as to have become already obsolete in the days of Zeus and Hades: his Titans, too, were so vast and muscular that no feat would have been difficult to them except that of interesting us. This sufficed for the first book of the poem; in the second book, the enterprise is already revealing itself as an impossible one, for the council at which Oceanus and others speak is reminiscent of the Pandæmonic council in Milton, and clearly very inferior to that. It could not well help resembling the scene in “Paradise Lost,” nor yet help being inferior; besides, even were it equal or preferable, Milton had done the thing first. The “large utterance of the early gods,” large though it be, tends to monotony. In book iii., we go off to Mnemosyne and Apollo; but of this section little remains, and we close the poem with a conviction that Keats, if he had succeeded in writing “a fragment as sublime as Æschylus,” was both prudent and fortunate in leaving it a fragment. To say that “Hyperion” is after all a semi-artificial utterance of the grand would be harsh, and ungrateful for so noble an effort of noble faculty; but to say that, by being prolonged, its grandeur must infallibly have partaken more and more of an artificial infusion, appears to me criticism entirely sound and safe.
Mr. Woodhouse has informed us: “The poem, if completed, would have treated of the dethronement of Hyperion, the former god of the sun, by Apollo; and incidentally of those of Oceanus by Neptune, of Saturn by Jupiter, &c., and of the war of the Giants for Saturn’s re-establishment; with other events of which we have but very dark hints in the mythological poets of Greece and Rome. In fact, the incidents would have been pure creations of the poet’s brain.” Here again Keats would have been partly forestalled by Milton: the combat of the Giants with the Olympian gods must have borne a very appreciable resemblance to the combat of Satan and his legions with the hosts of heaven. How far Keats’s “invention” would have sufficed to filling in this vast canvas may be questioned. The precedent of “Endymion,” in which he had attempted something of the same kind, was not wholly encouraging. The method and tone would of course have been very different; in what remains of “Hyperion,” the general current of diction is as severe as in “Endymion” it had been florid.
The other commencement of “Hyperion” (alluded to in my sixth chapter) was a later version, done in November and December 1819; it presents a great deal of poetic or scenic machinery in which the author’s personality was copiously introduced. This recast contains impressive things; but the prominence given to the author as spectator or participant of what he pictures forth was fulsome and fatal. Mr. Swinburne is in error (along with most other writers) in supposing this to be the earlier version of the two.
The tragedy of “Otho the Great,” written on a peculiar system of collaboration to which I have already referred, succeeded “Hyperion.” It is a tragedy on the Elizabethan model, and we find in scene i. a curious instance of Elizabethan contempt of chronology—a reference to “Hungarian petards.” The main factors in the plot are a fierce and fervent love-passion of the man, and an unscrupulous ambition of the woman, reddened with crime. Webster may perhaps have been taken by Keats as his chief prototype. To call “Otho the Great” an excellent drama would not be possible; but it can be read without tedium, and contains vigorous passages, and lines and images moulded with a fine poetic ardour. The action would be sufficient for stage-representation at a time when an audience come prepared to like a play if it is good in verse and strong in romantic emotion; under such conditions, while it could not be a great success, it need not nevertheless fall manifestly flat. Under any other conditions, such as those which prevail nowadays, this tragedy would necessarily run no chance at all. In a copy of Keats which belonged to Dante Gabriel Rossetti I find the following note of his, which may bear extracting: “This repulsive yet powerful play is of course in draft only. It is much less to be supposed that it would have been left so imperfect than to be surmised, from its imperfection, how very gradual the maturing of Keats’s best work probably may have been. It gives after all, perhaps, the strongest proof of robustness that Keats has left; and as a tragedy is scarcely more deficient than ‘Endymion’ as a poem. Both, viewed as wholes, are quite below Keats’s three masterpieces;[23] yet ‘Otho,’ as well as ‘Endymion,’ gives proof of his finest powers.” Another note from the same hand remarks: “The character and conduct of Albert [the lover of Auranthe murdered to clear the way for her ambition] are the finest point in the play.”
Of the later drama, “King Stephen,” so little was written that I need not dwell upon it here.
“Lamia” was begun about the same time as “Otho the Great,” but finished afterwards. The influence of Dryden, under which it was composed, has told strongly upon its versification, as marked especially in the very free use of alexandrines—generally the third line of a triplet, sometimes even the second line of a couplet. You might search “Endymion” in vain for alexandrines; and I will admit that their frequency appears to me to give an artificial tone to “Lamia.” The view which Keats has elected to take of his subject is worth considering. The heroine is a serpent-woman, or a double-natured being who can change from serpent into woman and vice versâ. In the female form she beguiles a young student of philosophy, Lycius, lives with him in a splendid palace, and finally celebrates their marriage-feast. The philosopher Apollonius attends among the guests, perceives her to be “human serpentry,” and, gazing on her with ruthless fixity, he compels her and all her apparatus of enchantment to vanish. This is the act for which (in lines partly quoted in these pages) Keats arraigns philosophy, and its power of stripping things bare of their illusions. No doubt a poet has a right to treat a legend of this sort from such point of view as he likes; it is for him, and not for his reader, to take the bull by the horns. But it does look rather like taking the bull by the weaker horn to contend that the philosopher who saves a youthful disciple from the wiles of a serpent is condemnably prosaic—a grovelling spirit that denudes life of its poetry. Conveniently for Keats’s theory, Lycius is made to die forthwith after the vanishing of his Lamia. If we invent a different finale to the poem, and say that Lycius fell down on his knees, and thanked Apollonius for saving him from such pestilent delusions and perilous blandishments, and ever afterwards looked out for the cloven tongue (if not the cloven hoof) when a pretty woman made advances to him, we may perhaps come quite as near to a right construction of so strange a series of events, and to the true moral of the story. But Keats’s championship was for the enjoying aspects of life; he may be held to have exercised it here rather perversely. “Lamia” is one of his completest and most finished pieces of writing—perhaps in this respect superior to all his other long poems, if we except “Hyperion”; it closes the roll of them with an affluence, even an excess, of sumptuous adornment. “Lamia” leaves on the mental palate a rich flavour, if not an absolutely healthy one.
Passing from the long compositions, we find the cream of Keats’s poetry in the ballad of “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” and in the five odes—“To Psyche,” “To Autumn,” “On Melancholy,” “To a Nightingale,” and “On a Grecian Urn.” “La Belle Dame sans Merci” may possibly have been written later than any of the odes, but this point is uncertain. I give it here as marking the highest point of romantic imagination to which Keats attained in dealing with human or quasi-human personages, and also his highest level of simplicity along with completeness of art.
“Ah what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,[24]
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.